Education with open source
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Today I have attended a talk by Mark Surman, the director of the Mozilla Foundation, at the Centre for Social Innovation with a couple of grad students. This talk is one of the series of Toronto NetTuesday, and the topic was about Mozilla Service week and CiviCRM.
It was very kind of him to spend more time with us, the students to have a separate talk. It was about how open source has been co-operating with education to improve the quality of participation and commitment nowadays. Also, he talks about the importance of commitment and openness in open source organization, regarding those two as the key philosophy of open source.
However, it leaves me a message that it is getting harder to participate into open source if you are new and not very well-known to the industry. Your ideas to contribute will either be cruelly banned, or accepted but with a harsh future. People need to fight very hard for their ideas in order to get funded, which means it's very not likely that they will share until they get the fame/funds that they want. That exactly violates the key philosophy that Mark has proposed. Does that also explains the low men:women ratio(0.1%) in open source area, which women care more about relationships while men care more about goals? What I take away from that talk with Mark is that somehow at sometime, the culture in open source needs to be more open in order for it to be prosperous.
Posted byA nerdy girl at 6:52 PM
Labels: Mark Surman, Toronto NetTuesday